


bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer

by HMK



Series: And Against All Odds, Happiness [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Also to clear this up, And they are not pulling any punches, And they could use some intense chill, But the hope of a truce?, Confrontations, Gen, General Unpleasantness, IN THIS HOUSE WE LOVE AND APPRECIATE LUCRETIA, In which Taako and Lucretia verbally come to blows, Lots of verbal barbs, Swearing, Taako for President, There is also a physical blow I guess, They are verbally pulling each others' hair and using their verbal nails, They are very very not nice to each other, They're both wrong/they're both right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 11:25:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12131430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HMK/pseuds/HMK
Summary: Tensions boil over.OrLucretia and Taako show all their cards...and then throw them at each other.





	bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer

 To his surprise, Lucretia seeks him out first.

“Taako! We need to talk.” Lucretia bursts into the kitchen, door swinging violently on its hinges behind her. She’s clearly agitated, which Taako doesn’t care too much about because he can already tell that whatever “talk” they have is going to make _him_ agitated. He just wishes that she could have waited an hour to have this talk because he really wanted to get this damn souffle down and now it’s probably going to fucking sink just like his opinion of Lucretia.

“Can this wait?” He asks, long suffering soul that he is, turning towards her, arms automatically crossing at his chest.

“You yelled at _Angus?_ ” Lucretia says in response, which of course means that it can’t. Or won’t. Whichever.

“You don’t get to be upset with me.” Taako retorts, heat climbing up his neck. It’s not like he’d _meant_ to snap at the kid earlier; Angus had just caught him at a bad moment that may or may not have lasted since the last time he’d spoken with Lucretia. Angus had popped up, all sincerity and “I’m sorry, sir”’s and all he’d been able to see was Angus in that corridor saying “I love her” and Taako doesn’t fucking do apologies, especially if they have to do with Lucretia in any way, shape, or form, and in the heat of the moment he might have told Angus to get lost. It wasn’t like he meant _permanently,_ and when did anyone take anything he said to heart anyway?

“Not if it’s me you’re upset with.” Lucretia agrees and even her amicability puts him on edge. “But Taako, you can’t keep taking your anger at me out on people who don’t deserve it.”

“Oh, so now you care about how people feel and what’s fair?” Taako shoots back at her and releases his arms, deciding he’s done with the conversation, and turns back to the oven to do something that’s actually productive.

Behind him, Lucretia is quiet. The silence drags on long enough that Taako is actually beginning to hope that Lucretia is planning on leaving sometime soon when long fingers dig into his shoulder, _hard,_ and yanks Taako back to face Lucretia. He opens his mouth to say something-a swear? A spell?-but he never gets to figure out what that something is because his words fizzle and die at the base of his throat at the look Lucretia is leveling at him. Her eyes aren’t soft with sorrow and regret like they have been for the last week, but hard and flinty and he realizes with a start that he’s never known what to do with her anger.

“How dare you?” Lucretia starts, her voice steady but carefully measured.

“I think I deserve to say whatever the fuck I want!”

“How about you tell me that when you actually do!”

“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh nothing, except there’s so much you’ve clearly been wanting to say this whole time, but no, you decided the best course of action was to take it out on the best goddamn child on the moon!”

“Fuck you!” Taako snaps, and his mind is scrambling to catch up with the current flow of conversation and trying to figure out how and why he’s on the defensive.

“That’s all you can say?” Lucretia challenges. “I thought you’d have other things that you’d want to say to me or can you only yell at children now? I thought you were better than that.”

The table behind Lucretia squeals across the ground as her weight suddenly gets thrown against it; Taako’s hands are trembling, arms still outstretched from pushing her away.

“I _was_ better than that.” He breathes at her, voice suddenly thin and high. She wonders if his wide-eyed gaze even sees her right at this moment or if he’s just staring straight through her. “I was better than that and then you took everything away from me.” A small noise emanates from Lucretia’s throat as if to say something, but he’s already speaking again in that same breathless, distant voice. “Because of you, I was alone. I thought I was nothing. I couldn't cook for so long because of you. You took _everything._ ”

“Taako, I-“

“It’s all your fault.” His wild gaze fixates on her, pupils constricting as his arms finally settle limply back to his sides. “I spent so long thinking that I-all of those people dead and I was on the run, and-I-it was all your fault!”

“Taako, don’t.”

“Don’t tell you what you did to me and all those people? Are the things you did too much for you to bear? Too much for your fucking feelings to handle? _Why the fuck shouldn’t I?_ ”

“Because Glamour Springs wasn’t my fault!”

Taako’s gaze is accusatory and mocking.

“If it weren’t for you, all those people at Glamour Springs would still be alive.”

“Maybe.” Lucretia says cautiously, straightening up and away from where she’d been thrown against the table. She sets her shoulders before continuing, “Maybe not. Maybe Sazed wouldn’t have let jealousy overcome him and wouldn’t have ended up poisoning an entire town. Maybe Glamour Springs would have never come into contact with the dangers of the outside world. Or maybe the Phoenix Gauntlet would have found its way there and turned it into another Phandalin. Maybe the Gaia Sash would have drowned it in a giant well or suffocated it under a giant cornfield. Maybe another Refuge would have existed.” Lucretia’s eyes meet his squarely and she continues, voice softer now, but all the worse for that. “Maybe the Philosopher’s Stone would have turned it all into pink tourmaline.”

“ _Shut up, Lucretia.”_

“Their deaths aren’t on you, Taako, you understand that, don’t you? But Taako, those deaths aren’t on me either.” She swallows hard, misery flashing across her face for a brief moment. “I put you on the road, among other things, and I have so much to answer for. But I didn’t poison them. I didn’t make Sazed poison them.” She paused for a moment, as though she didn’t want to say the next words but couldn’t hold them in any longer. “I have so, so much to atone for, and I know that, but I can’t take the blame for something that wasn’t me.”

Taako is quiet for a long moment, and when he speaks his voice cuts like shattered glass. “How terribly fucking convenient for you.”

“Taako.”

“Just pick and choose whatever’s fucking convenient for you, just like you always do. And if you don’t like it, then just change whatever you don’t like and don’t want to face, like the _coward that you-“_

Lucretia slaps him.

He slaps her back.

“I wasn’t the one who made you _run._ ” Lucretia says in a low voice, trembling voice, and he wants to slap her again.

“Whatever you tell yourself so you can sleep at night.” He say in what he hopes is a flippant tone and gathers himself, pulling all the composure that he can muster into himself. “You ruined my life.” He tells her when he can finally breathe without choking on his own anger. “I’d poison you in a heartbeat and never regret it.”

“Great.” Lucretia responds dryly. “Just let me know when. Now?”

The image of the people choking at Glamour Springs suddenly overcomes his mind’s eye, but no, suddenly all he sees is Lucretia, and now the two images are blurring and overlapping until it’s just Lucretia doubled over, coughing and pulling away a bloody hand from her stained lips. The image makes him feel powerful to know at least this time he’d be in charge, that he’s the reason for her pain and that it’s no accident, that it wasn’t because he made a mistake. And then he realizes that the dying Lucretia in this image isn’t accusing him and begging not to die; she looks weak but satisfied and he suddenly feels sick to his stomach.

“You really would, wouldn’t you?” He asks, wonderingly, and Lucretia raises a single shoulder in an uncomfortable shrug.

“Maybe.”

Taako rakes his gaze across her, as though really seeing her for the first time and shakes his head. “Just because you don’t value your life,” Lucretia’s expression turns tight, skin pulling tight against the bones of her skull, and he keeps pressing, harder now, he wants to see her _bleed_. “Or ours, it didn’t give you a right to erase who we were. Get out of my sight.”

Lucretia looks, for a brief moment, like she’d be more than happy to do just that. Slam through the swinging door and leave, so that they can spend the next week pretending that this encounter had never happened and allow Taako to hate her in peace. She’s drawn herself up, spine ramrod straight, and Taako expects her to bite out some final bitter benediction and leave when she suddenly deflates with a sigh, crumpling in on herself so that Taako fancies that he can actually see the fight going out of her. She leans back against the table like she can’t hold herself up anymore, one hand going back to grip the edge.

“I’m sorry.” She says, and she sounds so weary so often these days, like life has trampled the spirit right out of her. “Not-“ She flaps her hand dismissively at Taako and his inevitable acerbic comment about how all she’s been saying these days is sorry and the way it doesn’t mean a damn thing. “Shut, up, I’m talking and I’m not talking about what I did, though I _am_ sorry about that. I mean this. This conversation, I’m sorry.” Her free hand lifts up to her face, obscuring her eyes and Taako can hear the threat of tears in her voice and he doesn’t care, _he doesn’t care, damn it_ . “It wasn’t supposed to go like this. I just shouldn’t plan anything; things always end up going wrong.” Bitter mirth rises up inside of him and if it had been another moment, he would have found something to say about it. “I’m _sorry_ that you’re hurting and that it’s my fault and it kills me that I can’t make it better, no matter what I do. I love you so much you know, all of you, even if you don’t believe that anymore.” She drags her hand down across her face and composes herself with a shake of her head. When she meets his gaze, her eyes are dry, if red around the edges. “I’ll go now. But please, please talk to Angus, Taako, or I’ll have to come back and we’ll have another awful conversation where I say awful things I regret and shouldn’t have said. Spare us both that unpleasantness, won’t you?”

“ _Out,_ Lucretia.”

“Good night, Taako.”

Lucretia pushes the door open and is about to step over when Taako speaks again, looking away from her.

“Tell the little stinker-“

“ _Taako._ ”

“ _Lucretia._ ” Taako retorts at her mockingly before continuing. “Tell the runt to meet me in the cafeteria so I can show him how to cast a proper Whirlwind. Proper technique and all that.”

Lucretia’s eyes go soft with relief and she responds with a small nod, slipping quietly through the door before either of them feel the need to say anything else.

A few moments later, the door swings open again and Merle wanders in.

“So word on the grapevine is that you yelled at the kid toda-”

“OUT!" 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, so this is clearly a continuation from 'this is not a victory march'. Once again, I don't mean to demonize either character or show either of them in the wrong because I think that's highly reductive of a very complicated situation, but also I realize that any confrontation fic is bound to bring out the worst of people, and I think Taako and Lucretia have a lot of things they need to work through. I realize their argument reached an intense high and then kind of...died, but I feel like that's how a lot of pretty heavy arguments go in my experience. 
> 
> And this fic is not the end of things between Lucretia and Taako! The rest of this series will expand to include the rest of the IPRE but will be largely Lucretia-centric and never fear! There will be more Lucretia and Taako tensions and personally, I plan to move them, not to a place of rainbows and sunshine friendship, but a place of truce, tea, and civility. Civilitea. 
> 
> ...sorry, I'll let myself out. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
